0

Yahoo has just released a shiny new dedicated Yahoo! Mail application for iPads and Android tablets, following up on the big Mail interface overhaul they started rolling out back in December.

While it’s your pretty standard email client at its core, it’s got a clever trick or two packed up its sleeve that definitely make it worth checking out.

At launch, Yahoo! Mail looks like just about any other tablet mail app that came before it (albeit a bit more… purpley.)

You’ve got your inbox’s contents running down the left, and clicking any of your messages opens them in the view on the right.

At the bottom of each email is a lil’ fullscreen icon. Tap that, and…

Poof! goes the interface. All of the app’s chrome fades away, and all the useless email header muck is stripped out. You’re left with just the subject line, the list of recipients, and the body of the email. Tap the screen, and a floating bar with all of the common functions (reply, forward, trash, etc.) briefly fades into view.

Once you’re in the fullscreen view, the email reading experience becomes a bit like that of reading a magazine. Each email is its own page; swipe from right to left and the current page rolls away, replaced by the one behind it. It may seem like a trivial change, but it makes for a pretty damn good email reading environment. I can worry about one email at a time, forgetting about the endless abyss that lays behind it.

Speaking of endless abysses, they’ve also come up with some pretty neat stuff to help get you to inbox zero.

As you may have noticed in that top screenshot up above, each message in the email list has a lil’ checkbox next to it. Check the box, and you’ve got all the standard options — toss it, archive it, favorite it, whatever. Nothin’ new there, right?

Once you check a few more emails, however, Yahoo! starts to get pretty clever. The right view — the one normally reserved for displaying your email — becomes a running list of all the emails you’ve checked so far. Rather than having to scroll up and down your seemingly endless inbox to remember which messages you’ve checked, you’ve got that info at a glance.

This right-most list is automatically grouped by sender, and each group is independently actionable. You can toss all the emails from one group of checked emails into the trash and another group into archive — or you can perform one action on everything you’ve checked en masse.

But it gets neater! Lets say you’ve got a few dozen Facebook notification emails splayed out across your inbox. Once you’ve checked one or two of’em, Yahoo! Mail will pick up on what you’re doing and offer up a one-tap button that auto-checks all similar messages from the same sender. For those of us who find ourselves in never-ending inbox triage mode, it’s a nice touch.

One annoyance that might nag the more hardcore Yahoo! Mail users out there: like the iPhone app that came before it, it seems that this new iPad app only supports a single Yahoo! Mail account at a time.

Beyond that, the whole app is really quite slick. While there’s nothing completely earth shattering, it all comes together into what feels like a super polished, super-thought-out experience.

Good job, Marissa. This thing actually has me considering using Yahoo! Mail again.